


Bright Eyes

by doublejoint



Category: Princess Nine
Genre: F/F, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29299806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: They could have been competitors.
Relationships: Himuro Izumi/Mita Kanako
Collections: February Ficlet Challenge 2021: Apocalypse No





	Bright Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> For Day 8 of the February Ficlet Challenge: Fire

If they were just a little different, they’d probably hate each other. Izumi considers the notion, then throws it away as soon as she feels it gripped in her hands, along with the baseball that’s a few seconds from returning to her. Snap. Snap. The ball lands in Kanako’s glove, and she’s already digging her hand in, rotating the seam as she draws her arm back in a fluid motion. There’s no time to admire it, but that’s only because Izumi lacks the experience to pay attention to both Kanako and the ball as it shoots straight for her glove. 

If she were to catch it in the wrong place, it would sting her fingers. Even professionals do that sometimes, Hayakawa says, but Izumi’s still not planning on doing that at all if she can help it. She’ll hold herself to a higher standard; to accept imperfection is to be sloppy, to treat yourself as if you are not worthy of the best. Kanako is the same; they were raised in the same world. The thought returns; Izumi draws her arm back, focuses on her elbow. She can’t let it drop and send the ball careening off into the outfield, and she does not.

They would be natural rivals, if either of them cared much for it. Kanako’s father would always loudly praise her academics, her proficiency in science, how she balanced it with softball in middle school. Izumi’s mother would catch those remarks as easily as infield flies and say that Izumi didn’t have to rely on a field like medicine (that her inheritance would be enough of a career), but that her grades were stellar as well, would act like she cared about Izumi’s tennis career in return. And when Kanako’s father had said that of course his daughter would be quitting softball to focus on her studies, Izumi’s mother had responded that Izumi could handle both--couldn’t Kanako?

At the time, Izumi hadn’t been thinking much about how dejected Kanako looked, only that she didn’t want to win anything as a pawn of her mother. That this was a farce. At the time, she’d thought Kanako earnestly had thought of her as a rival, but that wasn’t it, was it? Kanako just hadn’t wanted to quit, but she’d been forced into a corner, along a narrowing path toward her future. 

Izumi’s is even narrower; sport is just something nice to boost her resume, keep her healthy and ready, and (now that it’s baseball) indulge her mother’s whims. Her path has been widened, but it’s only an illusion. Ahead of her she can see it narrowing, and baseball being pruned off like a dead branch. She can say she won’t let it happen, but she’s not a good enough baseball player to back it up right now.

The ball lands in her glove again, pushing at the webbing. Izumi lands on her front foot wrong; the ball goes sailing up and to the left, but with a well-timed jump Kanako catches it easily, throws it back perfectly on line again. She has brought the rhythm back in, or perhaps kept it from going off the track in the first place. There is no time to acknowledge it; the ball is back in Izumi’s glove. Another chance, a perfect throw; that does not erase her mistake. It only outweighs it, and with something this inconsequential, lets her put it behind herself easily.

* * *

They could have been competitors. In their parents’ eyes, they probably are. But there is little room for that kind of competition among teammates on the baseball diamond, at least teammates as different as they are. They play different positions; their offensive strengths are different; they are not competing for the last spot on the roster or the first spot in the rotation. Perhaps that’s why Kanako had always loved baseball and softball; the limit to the competition is delineated. There is a point where she does not stand alone, carrying ever-increasing burdens of schoolwork and reputation and representation. On the diamond, she is not just her father’s daughter. She is only pitted against her opponents, the pitchers and hitters and runners and fielders. But Izumi is unequivocally Kanako’s ally.

Without that, Kanako would never have the initiative to approach Izumi. She would seem unreachable, the model of perfection, even if Kanako knows from the other side what goes into maintaining that model. (Izumi pulls it off better, but Kanako knows she’s too used to seeing both of them at such different angles that drawing the comparison is useless.) She’s seen Izumi struggle with her throwing accuracy. She’s seen Izumi swing and swing and swing at the batting cages, and then gather all the balls herself to restart. She’s stayed after with her, doing fielding drills, until they’re both soaked in sweat, until Izumi’s pants and socks are practically torn through, until Izumi accepts that the returns are diminishing. 

Her fire still burns, bright through the ashes, bright through the eyes, bright in her fingers gripping the seam of the baseball. She is gorgeous; she is improving; Kanako, after denying herself everything for so long, cannot let herself not want. They are competing for nothing; rather, they aren’t competing at all, because they never were. In another life, perhaps they were; perhaps Izumi played softball at a different middle school, or Kanako took up tennis and smacked her anger out with a racket instead of with a bat. In that life, she probably wouldn’t have been able to join the baseball team, or meet Izumi outside of the context that allows them to be no more than their parents’ children. 

They hadn’t always seen each other as more than that, but that just means the time they’ve lost is a more obvious need to make up for, an excuse to go for things. To slip her hand in Izumi’s back pocket, to lean on her shoulder, to tap gloves when they don’t need to. To take the initiative, to try for what she wants--because if they both want it, that’s the only incentive Kanako needs.


End file.
